Welcome to Hyperion Records, an independent British classical label devoted to presenting high-quality recordings of music of all styles and from all periods from the twelfth century to the twenty-first.

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'Bantock's prodigious output as a composer … rested in the long grass for decades until Vernon Handley's Hyperion recordings revealed the many qu ...'What an achievement! Twenty-one late-romantic orchestral works in one box at mid-price or better. Bantock's lavish romanticism is superbly served by ...» More

The wilderness and the solitary place shall be glad for them; and the desert shall rejoice and blossom as the rose. It shall blossom abundantly, and rejoice even with joy and singing: the glory of Lebanon shall be given unto it, the excellency of Carmel and Sharon; they shall see the glory of the Lord, and the excellency of our God. Strengthen ye the weak hands, and confirm the feeble knees. Say to them that are of a fearful heart, Be strong, fear not: behold, your God will come with vengeance, even God with a recompence; he will come to save you. Then the eyes of the blind shall be opened, and the ears of the deaf shall be unstopped: Then shall the lame man leap as an hart, and the tongue of the dumb sing; for in the wilderness shall waters break out, and streams in the desert. And the parched ground shall become a pool, and the thirsty land springs of water. And an highway shall be there, and a way, and it shall be called The way of holiness; And the ransomed of the Lord shall return, and come to Zion with songs, and everlasting joy upon their heads: they shall obtain joy, and gladness, and sorrow and sighing shall flee away.

Bantock was given to vast musical epics which, conceived in a moment, actually took years to complete on paper. We have parts of two of these in this programme. Bantock’s first such epic had been his cycle of twenty-four tone poems based on Southey’s poetic epic The Curse of Kehama, of which six were actually completed. Conceived in the early 1890s, composition dragged on to 1901, and two of them were published in full score, but the cycle as a whole ran into the sand. In the late 1890s Bantock then conceived an epic re-telling of the story of Christ in his Christus, which was completed in a vast 700-page orchestral full score. This he described as a ‘Festival Symphony in 10 parts’. After an extended Prelude, the sections were ‘Nazareth’, ‘The Wilderness’, ‘The Woman of Samaria’, ‘Jerusalem’, ‘The Mount of Olives’, ‘The Paschal Eve’, ‘Gethsemane’, ‘The Judgement’, ‘Calvary’, and ‘Epilogue’, the last consisting of a vast chorus ‘Arise, Shine’ and dated 21 August 1901. The whole consisted of twenty-four numbers of which The Wilderness and the Solitary Place is No 6. In this scheme Bantock is clearly anticipating Elgar’s oratorios The Apostles and The Kingdom, but although Bantock can produce brilliantly coloured episodes and massive imposing choruses he does not have Elgar’s wide-spanning dramatic immediacy nor his depth of Biblical scholarship. In 1900 Bantock published (with Breitkopf & Härtel) a much cut-down version in vocal score as Christus, a festival symphony in five parts, and later he extracted two short oratorios—Christ in the Wilderness in 1907, and Gethsemane in 1910, which had some shorted-lived following at the time. The aria recorded here appeared in Christ in the Wilderness and was heard in the complete work at that year’s Three Choirs Festival at Gloucester. But in fact, as a separate concert encore it had already been heard at Hereford in 1903. With its feeling of an exotic dance marked by tambourine, and idiosyncratic scoring for wind and harps, it continued to be heard occasionally as a concert encore until it was forgotten after the Second World War.